The Awful Truth (1937)
Directed by Leo McCarey
Unfounded suspicions lead a married couple to begin divorce proceedings, whereupon they start undermining each other's attempts to find new romance.
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What critics compared The Awful Truth to
The film’s title may be a nod to Leo McCarey’s The Awful Truth, and while Robert Luketic’s synthetic rom-com is, of course, worlds away from McCarey’s comedy-of-remarriage masterpiece, the charmingly brittle chemistry between leads Katherine Heigl and Gerard Butler keeps things moving pleasurably enough along.
The title of The Ugly Truth echoes that of The Awful Truth, the 1937 Cary Grant-Irene Dunne battle-of-the-sexes film that essentially invented the comic-romantic persona that Grant would wear with such panache for the duration of his career.
Clooney and the absolutely first-class Farmiga project the kind of understated sexual chemistry and easy intellectual rapport reminiscent of Nick and Nora in " The Thin Man ," Cary Grant and Irene Dunne in " The Awful Truth ."
The philosopher Stanley Cavell has called the classic screwball movies like The Awful Truth (1937) and The Lady Eve (1941) "comedies of remarriage," in which couples are rudely bounced from their Edenic connubial gardens and reunited (after a series of farcical/magical contrivances) in a spirit of wry realism: This time they know they'll live bumpily ever after.
But it's in this segment that Giant's objective--to redefine masculinity for Bick as something not founded on chauvinistic principles--surfaces, leading to a thoughtful denouement that, like the epilogue of Leo McCarey's The Awful Truth , shows "'til death do us part" from a comforting angle.
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Instead, there's a kinship with Hollywood's screwball comedies of the 1930s, where an unlikely romance blossoms in the flurries of a rough and tumble escapade, like the beautiful zaniness of Bringing Up Baby (1938) or classic divorce scenario in The Awful Truth (1937), except equipped with the foul-mouthed glory and sexual fervor inherent to reality.
Which is fine: Cary Grant and Irene Dunne didn't deny their movie-star qualities in " The Awful Truth ," either.
…that dates back to a 1920s Arthur Richman play, The Awful Truth, which was filmed twice before finding its classic incarnation as a star vehicle for Cary Grant and Irene Dunne in 1937.
This is in that curious sub-genre of films like “The Awful Truth” and “Divorce American Style” in which a couple splits, takes on new lovers, and then begins to wonder whether or not they have made a terrible mistake.
In the remarriage classics (“The Awful Truth,” “The Philadelphia Story,” “His Girl Friday”), the former partners have a way of talking and being with each other that they don’t have—and couldn’t possibly have—with anyone else.
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A prime slab of '50s beef directed by veteran Leo McCarey (Duck Soup, Make Way for Tomorrow, The Awful Truth), the picture includes CinemaScope photography and four gratuitous songs, including "An Affair to Remember (Our Love Affair)," sung by Vic Damone over the opening credits.
After his Oscar-winning hit The Awful Truth , director Leo McCarey came back 20 years later with another sophisticated Cary Grant film, but this one goes on to tug at the heartstrings.
Despite their apparent on-set improvisations, Grant doesn’t have the easy comic and romantic chemistry with Deborah Kerr as he had with Irene Dunne in other Leo McCarey films such as The Awful Truth or Penny Serenade or with Katherine Hepburn in Holiday or Bringing Up Baby.